Jaguars interim coach Darrell Bevell interested in the permanent job
Jacksonville is conducting another coaching search after less than a year, as Urban Meyer’s foray into the NFL didn’t go as planned. The three-time national championship-winning coach at the collegiate level had a Jaguars tenure plagued by controversy and poor performances on the field, and he was fired 13 games into his first season.
Offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell has led the team in the last two games as the interim coach, and it hasn’t resulted in much of a change as the Jags lost to two of the worst teams in the AFC in the New York Jets and Houston Texans.
The team has already put in several requests for interviews in a search that seems like it will be much more thorough than it was last time around when owner Shad Khan had his sights set on Meyer from the start. Still, that doesn’t mean fans can rule out the coach currently in that role, and on Wednesday, Bevell said he would be interested in the full-time head coaching job.
“I’ve not had any conversations about that up to this point, you know, up to this point,” Bevell said Wednesday, according to John Reid of the Florida Times-Union. “Right now, we’re mired in this COVID-19 stuff, you know just trying to get a team out there. But as far as being interested, I would be, yes.”
Keeping an interim coach around certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented for Khan. When he fired coach Gus Bradley before the end of the season in 2016, he elected to promote interim coach Doug Marrone instead of making a hire from outside the organization. With that being said, Bevell is not among the list of names the Jaguars currently intend to interview in the coming weeks.
Given the unmitigated disaster that the 2021 season has been, it seems unlikely that the organization will choose a coach that was on the previous staff. But at the same time, it seemed unlikely that general manager Trent Baalke would stick around, and yet that appears to be the case (for now, at least).
Anytime there’s a coaching change, you can expect that the interim will get at least a brief look, and it should come as no surprise that Bevell, who has been an NFL offensive coordinator since 2006 and now has two separate stints as an interim coach, would be interested in the Jaguars job.
